I know you hear this all the time, but I need your help. My guild and I are pretty frustrated with my lack of dps. I’m always on the bottom of the dps meters with about 56k – 58k dps on boss fights. The rest of them are up in the 70k – 80k.

I have always been an amazing kitty druid in the last expansions, but this one hit and I am just awful. It has me kind of depressed and hating the game. I’d like to start enjoying it again.

Here is a link to my guilds world of logs, my toon is Moonwisper. I’ll admit lately I have been so depressed over my lack of dps and how irritated people in my guild are at me, I haven’t been doing my 100% best, but it seems that even when I do (for instance that Feng fight I mention below) I come out way on the bottom.

I know I need to keep my Savage Roar up 100% of the time and I have been working on that. Looking at our world of logs tonight I have reason to believe it is cheating me. On our Feng fight I know for a fact my Savage Roar was up the entire time, because I was doing a test to see what world of logs said. World of logs said it was up only 97.9%.

So my questions for you:1. Am I doing the dps that my gear allows?2. Do I need better gear to achieve the 70k – 80k dps scores that my guild wants, or can I somehow do it with what I have now?3. I have tried various specs, gear reforging and gems. I seem to be bad no matter what. I use Mr. Robot for reforging/gem advice. Some people say it is awful, is this true?4. I like being hit/exp cap. You’ll notice the red gems I have in my gear now aren’t agility gems. I thought I would try something different to see if it helped. Are agility gems the way to go, as it always has been?

I appreciate the time you are taking to help me. I am running out of hope that I will be able to enjoy raiding on my feral druid again, as I dread even getting online lately.

Place was closed so I had to make my own.Short answers:1. With your current gear you should be able to be hitting around the same as your raid on some fights (Feng, Gara'Jal are great ones for us). Don't worry I have a few suggestions later on.2. See above.3. Mr Robot is a pretty site, but they have some weird ideas about how good our stats are. I perfer Wowreforge.com. The default stat weights are solid for us, and it will try and get your to hit/exp caps with just a quick button press (optimize).4. Agility is our #1 stat. It is much better then Mastery (over 2 times as good). You will be much better off regemming for Agility then Mastery. Same goes for trying to get socket bonuses. In your case getting the helm, chest and the pants are the only worth while ones. The rest just gem straight Agility. I loaded you up on WoWReforge.com and was still able to get Hit/Exp caps even with out the belt socket bonus and the hit gems.

I took a look at a few of the fights and have a few suggestions:Feng - This is the only fight you took Incarnation. As you didn't use it in any of the other logs I assume it was just to try it out. In general it is a really bad talent for us. Even though Ravage does big damage, its higher energy cost causes our rotation to fall apart. I also saw that you didn't use Incarnation with Berserk. This just compounds the energy issue. You also are using Thrash a lot more then might be recomended. It's great to use with OOC procs, but only if other stuff isn't going to suffer for it.

Gara'Jal is a tough fight to look at unless you are the one taking the logs. If you don't the person taking the logs won't see you in the combat log when you or them to to the spirit relm.

In general it looks like you are trying to do to much with out getting used to our more complicated rotation. I would suggest you pick up Ovale and Leafs script and pratice on the target dummies for a while. Once you start getting the hang of it, it will be easier to execute in the raid itself. I will try and go through some more of the fights tomorrow (way past my bed time) and come up with some more tips you can use.

Expertise: Your expertise is 62 over de cap, these 62 points are better off somewhere else.

DoC is potentially the best feral DPS talent, when used correctly, however, whenever this isn't used (correctly) it can result in a huge dps loss.Based on your WoL, there seems to be some pretty big gaps between when DoC is procced (according to WoL it's procced 21 times over a period of 5,5 minutes. which boils down to about 3.5 per minute). Now I'm not a DoC user, so I don't know if this is good or bad.

What i can see however, is your DoT damage, which.. based on your mastery and DoC should be a bit higher than mine, your DoT uptime and your SR uptime.

As you can see, i'm not a star at keeping SR up nor with refreshing my Rip in time, so potentialy my own dps can be higher as well.Now, the biggest difference we can see is the Rip damage, between 9k average normal hits and 19k average critical hits lower. This is a massive amount of dps.I don't know what is causing this dps loss, but it seems like either rip is being used without 5 combo points or without DoC (or both).

2. Do I need better gear to achieve the 70k – 80k dps scores that my guild wants, or can I somehow do it with what I have now?

It is possible with your current gear, although the weapon from the Spirit kings will probably aid you in this a lot as well .

3. I have tried various specs, gear reforging and gems. I seem to be bad no matter what. I use Mr. Robot for reforging/gem advice. Some people say it is awful, is this true?

My current gems are done based on the information i got here, i lock those in Mr. Robot cause it seems to prefer mastery, while i'd rather have Agility / Mastery.Enchant wise and Reforge wise, I do try to follow ask mr. Robot and well, see the attached WoL file for the results.

4. I like being hit/exp cap. You’ll notice the red gems I have in my gear now aren’t agility gems. I thought I would try something different to see if it helped. Are agility gems the way to go, as it always has been?

In my own opinion, yes. The way i currently gem isRed: AgilityYellow: Orange Agility / MasteryBlue: Green Hit / Mastery

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Hopefully I could have helped you a little, however, please wait for the response from Tinder or any other more knowledgable ferals, just trying my part here .

I know one thing that can really help immediately is keeping DoT uptimes. This is the closest fight to patchwerk we'll find, so it's a good boss to help improve on! I was able to keep my Rake up 97% and Rip 92%, obv. we'll want SR up 100%, but I think we were both high 90% so that is good.

I would follow Tinder's gem/reforge advice (he's a genius!!), and keep in mind that the upgraded items are not showing up. So take the difference in hit/exp and subtract that from 2550, and it will put you (in game) @ 7.5%.

Agi is always the best stat, it's up around 5.0 weight and mastery (next highest) is 1.93 - 2.02 (depending where you look), so even w/ double stats in gems, it doesn't equal an agility point. I gem Agi, or Agi/Hit or Agi/Mastery if it is an Agi socket bonus. I've learned tons of stuff from just reading threads here, and it's helped me a TON! Even doubled my DPS on Elegon since a few weeks ago. I'll be interested to hear what Tinder says, so I can learn some more stuff too!

I wanted to correct something that you said, Tinderhoof: The stat weights on wowreforge are from Ask Mr. Robot. They use a lot of our stat weights (with our permission). So they are exactly the same.

The 2 sites might get different results that are within 0.05% of each other because our algorithms are different. However, both sites are excellent.

As for the gems issue, Moonwisp: it's all about the math. Mr. Robot will choose gems based on the stat weights, while taking the socket bonus into account. However, you're doing the right thing if you want to keep your own gem setup: locking them in will change the refoges, which is what you want. So it sounds like you're using the site to customize your setup while optimizing the results

There's not really any reason to gem like that. Barring any caps on stats the rule of thumb for gemming is if you don't have the same one stat in every gem slot then you're just gemming inconsistently (therefore suboptimally).

Basically what I mean is that if you're gemming Agility in red sockets (therefore implying you think Agility is your best stat, which it is) then gemming Hit / Mastery in blue sockets instead of Agility / Hit doesn't make in sense because you've already established that you think Agility is your best stat.

The correct way to gem would be:Red / Prismatic: AgilityYellow: Agi / MasteryBlue: Agi / HitYou generally only want to match the socket bonus if at least 1 of the sockets are Red OR the socket bonus is agility.

Here's a spreadsheet I just made (mostly just wanted to make one because I thought it would be fun ) that will tell what you should gem given a certain socket color / bonus combination, hopefully someone finds it useful (File -> Make a copy):https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc ... Hl2TFBnT3c

zoopercat wrote:Hey, I'm from Ask Mr. Robot.The 2 sites might get different results that are within 0.05% of each other because our algorithms are different. However, both sites are excellent.

Hi zooper, I have used both sites, and have used wowreforge a lot more recently, because they tend to get me closer to 7.5% exactly, and I think mr. robot could do this if they had a static hit cap/exp cap to get and then a normal stat weight. (If memory serves me right, they used to do this but took it out for some reason).

on wowreforge, I can take the diff. of hit from my upgraded gloves and the normal gloves and find the hit cap I want to recalculate (for example). This has never failed to put me at 7.5% - 7.56% hit/exp, whereas with mr. robot, I have to change hit/exp weights so high (usually 15.0) so that it caps me, and then I'm at 7.75% and higher because of the item upgrades. Just a suggestion because I love the UI of Mr. Robot!

There's not really any reason to gem like that. Barring any caps on stats the rule of thumb for gemming is if you don't have the same one stat in every gem slot then you're just gemming inconsistently (therefore suboptimally).

Basically what I mean is that if you're gemming Agility in red sockets (therefore implying you think Agility is your best stat, which it is) then gemming Hit / Mastery in blue sockets instead of Agility / Hit doesn't make in sense because you've already established that you think Agility is your best stat.

The correct way to gem would be:Red / Prismatic: AgilityYellow: Agi / MasteryBlue: Agi / HitYou generally only want to match the socket bonus if at least 1 of the sockets are Red OR the socket bonus is agility.

Here's a spreadsheet I just made (mostly just wanted to make one because I thought it would be fun ) that will tell what you should gem given a certain socket color / bonus combination, hopefully someone finds it useful (File -> Make a copy):https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc ... Hl2TFBnT3c

You're absolutely right, i should gem for Agi / Hit instead of Hit / Mastery in blue sockets, i don't even know why i went with Hit / Mastery, but somehow i convinced myself it was a good idea

Hi ZooperCat. Great that you could join us here. We are begining to collect a lot of the community around here. I think its a good thing to open a dialog here about some of the issues that greener Ferals, or folks who are coming back to the spec run into. Now I do have some critisims for AskMrRobot that I generalized previously, but I will go into them in more detail below. Please know I offer these as observations and not a personal slam.

zoopercat wrote:I wanted to correct something that you said, Tinderhoof: The stat weights on wowreforge are from Ask Mr. Robot. They use a lot of our stat weights (with our permission). So they are exactly the same.

zoopercat wrote:The 2 sites might get different results that are within 0.05% of each other because our algorithms are different. However, both sites are excellent.

How WoWReforge treats the secondary stat values is different from AskMrRobot. As a result both produce very different results.

WowReforge only looks at the secondary stats on your gear that can be reforged. By default (for Feral at least) WoWReforge will ignore the stat weights of Hit and Exp and just cap them. From there it will maximize your highest stat value followed by second and so on.

AskMrRobot takes all stat weights into consideration and will attempt to optimize Gems, Enchants and Reforges. Like Rawr it uses stat weights to adjust everything. I am not sure how you came to the numbers you are using for your stat weights, but I am not sure I agree with them. For example in my case it suggests that I drop 1070 Agility in favor of 2200 Mastery. With how powerful Agility is to us, that to me is a weird result. Also even with the Hit/Exp favored profile I am below the hit cap by 80 and over the exp cap by 50

It is because of these results that I favor WoWReforge for reforging questions only. I think that AskMrRobot has a lot of good things going for it. You already support the Ilvl bumps even though the armory hasn't caught up. You have a much better interface for swaping gear and gems. You also have a lot of customization options.

I would be happy to go over more in depth how our views of the stat weights differ, but perhaps in another topic or in game?

Tinderhoof, thanks for taking the time to post. It's always very helpful. There's a LOT of specs and classes and we spend a lot of time keeping up with all of them. But, we know that communities like this are the real experts. So we love the interaction / help.

I'm going to make a post about AMR and respond to your thoughts there. In the meantime, some of the info here might be useful, but you probably already know most of it. edit: I can't include the link b/c it's flagged as spam. So here's the url you can piece together: blog.askmrrobot.com/2012/10/how-does-mr-robots-optimizer-work/

Instaqueues: we recently added a feature that forces the hit cap (a few weeks ago). Open the options window and check that if you want to get to AT LEAST the hit cap. That being said, there are cases where getting over or under the hit cap can result in a higher score than getting EXACTLY to the cap. The short, over simplified example is this:

--Let's say to get exactly to the cap, you need 200 more hit.--Option 1: Remove 200 Mastery to get 200 Hit on your legs. It's the only piece with exactly 200 rating.--Option 2: Remove 210 Haste to get 210 Hit on your chest. You go over the cap, but you sacrifice a bad secondary stat, keeping mastery in-tact.

Obviously, that's over-simplified, but it happens quite often with the various reforge combinations available. That being said, wowreforge is able to check more reforge combinations than we can (but not ALL of them), so sometimes they can come out with a reforge-only solution that's 0.05% better than AMR. Since we do Gems / Enchants / Reforges, the combinations we check grow exponentially. We also optimize you in less than a second, whereas wowreforge takes longer. So there's a tradeoff - and both sites do a good job, and neither is taking a wrong approach.

I'll post more infoz in an AMR thread so we can keep a discussion going, help people learn how to use it, and maybe uncover a few bugs (GASP!) and other suggestions

zoopercat wrote:Tinderhoof, thanks for taking the time to post. It's always very helpful. There's a LOT of specs and classes and we spend a lot of time keeping up with all of them. But, we know that communities like this are the real experts. So we love the interaction / help.

I'm going to make a post about AMR and respond to your thoughts there. In the meantime, some of the info here might be useful, but you probably already know most of it. edit: I can't include the link b/c it's flagged as spam. So here's the url you can piece together: blog.askmrrobot.com/2012/10/how-does-mr-robots-optimizer-work/

Totally understand the massive scope you guys have to work with. Sorry about the link issue. The board has been shielded for the most part, but the last 3 weeks Leaf and I have been doing some epic battles with spam bots. Should be resolved now so we should be able to relax those restrictions in the near future.

zoopercat wrote:Instaqueues: we recently added a feature that forces the hit cap (a few weeks ago). Open the options window and check that if you want to get to AT LEAST the hit cap. That being said, there are cases where getting over or under the hit cap can result in a higher score than getting EXACTLY to the cap.

I did actually find this while doing research for the post. I wasn't looking for it in specific though and kinda stumbled around onto it.

Thanks Zoopercat I'd love to use only mr. robot, because I really do like the GUI for the site. Wowreforge has simcrafted me higher every time so far since I've switched from guardian (about a month ago), but I do check both sites for different reasons. I do understand the being slightly under or over being better some times, that comes down to simple math based on weights And don't get me wrong, I'll never be perfect enough to know the difference while I'm playing

I would love to see a thread about this though, although my input would be nothing, I always enjoy seeing the math and logic that is behind the scenes of why our dps is what it is. If you need to talk about guardians, I could offer input there

I'll have to try wowreforge or some other reforge optimizer, because MrRobot has been behaving weirdly lately. Anyone can reproduce this behaviour? Even with an enormous agility coefficient, it keeps suggesting hybrid gems. To see what I mean try to load my character (EU-Dalaran / Helistar) and optimize with the "default" weights.Ignore the fact that it adds a sha-gem I don't have and close your eyes not to see that I'm missing a JC-only gem and look at the belt gems: it's respecting the socket colors.Open the "Edit Weights" and change the agility weight to 50 (yes, fifty). The optimizer STILL keeps respecting the socket colors in the belt gems (note that the belt socket bonus is expertise, which is now worth 25 times less then agi......).Any of you experiencing the same problem?

However only one of my guildies noticed, so that was kind of a bummer. Then things just went south when we got to the Garalon fight and I wasn't pulling the 100k that our warrior was. The last attempt on him was my better one, was able to put more dots on the boss in between legs. I'm going to go see if you guys have tips on that boss on here somewhere.

Well, it isn't. It's still respecting socket colors in the belt even if it's not optimal. Open up the belt and lock the three red gems: you'll see that the total score goes up to 148089, which is higher than the result of the optimizer.....

Yellow/Blue scores 2344 points and Red/Red scores 2376 points so the difference between the two solutions is 1.6% percent (and for the record using more accurate stat weights the difference is half that), or an overall difference of 0.024%.

I'm not questioning that the difference is irrelevant, but I expect that an optimizer should look for the optimal solution. When it fails to optimize gem placement, clearly going against what was posted on the mrrobot blog, I start to wonder how reliable the overall result is....In particular, I really dislike that it suggests to change from the current configuration to a worse one.... it's not even a matter of determining the optimal point, it's failing to recognize it and telling me I should pay for gems which are worse than the old ones....

Without disregarding the advice in this thread I would still suggest to shift your focus from you gear to your fingers. While gems and reforging are important, it is much more so to hit the right buttons at the right time. As this seems to be the core of your problem I would strongly suggest that you start by switching your talents to HOTW (and SOTF but you allready got that talent). Just ignore the on-use part of the talent and use it for AOE damage or extra strong tranquility when required and otherwise (and more important) just enjoy the feral rotation more or less like it has been in the last expansions.

As allready stated in this thread, you need to master DOC to gain more dps than the passive buff from HOTW would provide for you without any complifications. So don't make the rotation more difficult as it needs to be and start by doing better in the 'old' rotation. Just reforge and gem as you would if you still got DOC, so follow the guidelines in this thread and you'll be fine, don't overdo it. A wrong gem or reforge here and there won't impact your dps as much as pushing one or two wrong buttons in a fight will do.

After switching the talents get Leafkillers amazing script by installing and configuring "Nerien's Ovale Scripts" addon (I guess you allready got that but just to make sure) and hit that stupid target dummy for at least half an hour every day. Try to be drunk or watch a movie or whatever you like while doing this will make sure you can maintain the rotation even when the bossfight gets more complicated or you need to do other real life tasks like talking to your girlfirned on the phone while raiding

Do this and you dps will go up by a magnitude after 5 or 6 training dummy sessions. Even less when you allready know the rotation from before and will faster get used to the little tweaks and changes. Feel free to optimize your gear, gems, enchants and so on but as the most important thing: get the rotation into your hands or stomach or whatever you use to automatically do the right thing without thinking.